HENRY WHITE'S GUEST POST ON FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY.
Henry White agreed to take over for me on random Saturdays
so I could go helicopter bungee jumping over the volcano near Grindavik
and get my mind into a mellow place.
Having seen first hand that everything in the art world of photography has already been done, seen, critiqued, lionized, demonized, exploited or discarded I switched from making beautiful color photographs of flowers (all large dye transfers printed by Bob) to making austere and oppressive grayscale images of buildings, roadways, shop windows and rubbish along the sides of roads. Once I "unmastered" myself from the constraints of logic, good taste, humanism, and sincere, authentic interest in subjects imprisoned by my cameras I was freed to engage in abstractly chaotic street photography and New Documentarianism to my heart's content.
Following in one of my mentor's footsteps I endeavored to find the best coffee in my home town and used the proximity to the various coffee shops as a formalist boundary structure to contain my work within a geographical box. Within a construct of minimalization of scope I would move my pursuit of pure, ordered photography to a pursuit of strict visual chaos larded with purposeful bad timing and a general ignoring of compositional structure. By eliminating the merchant class fixation with color from the work I was able to pull out one more parameter of interest in order to keep the viewers off kilter so they could approach my new work with the trepidation of one who walks blindfolded through a mine field. Hoping to find some "treasure" at the end of their short or long journey.
Recent physics papers have hinted that every structure in the universe is possessed of its own consciousness and I used that as a jumping off point to decry our prejudicial myopia about the relative value of subjects based on academic constructs of beauty and cultural relevance. To my eye every piece of gravel, every discarded condom and every tortured human standing next to an ironic sign has absolutely equal value and represents a mirror for my own möbius strip existence. I also drop the names, Kant, Neitzsche, Hume, and Cher as often as I can when writing about my work. It makes everything so much more Lucida for my newly found collectors...
I approached many galleries and all the doors were welded shut. Me on the outside and the likes of Leroi Neiman and George Bush firmly and comfortably seated inside. That is.....Until a famous museum curator chanced to see my Plate #324 and, after scraping it off his windshield, declared that the work showed me to have an incisive and "once in a generation" ability to decode the emptiness and mental depravity of early 21st century post corporate existence. I was giddy.
He encouraged me not to make large and luminous prints but to work on flattening my black and white palettes into a porridge of unrelenting gray tones and presenting them in books not printed via a quad tone, tri-tone or even duotone processes but in strictly constrained, half tone grayscale. And he further encouraged me to make all the images in every one of my five hundred almost identical (but slightly different) books smaller and less "engorged with duplicitous decoration of size" but more universally accessible, by printing them smaller.
With his manifesto and some prints in hand my newly befriended curator showed up drunk at a Steven Meisel Party in Kuai, played scrabble with spider monkeys and met an unattractive heiress who took pity on my work, examples of which the curator wore on his lounge kimono, and put me up for both a Guggenheim grant and also a MacArthur Genius award. I was able then to purchase a fine art Range Rover and finally buy health insurance. But the phone has never stopped ringing and Anna Devere Smith refuses to give up stopping by my house without an invitation. You'd think she and David Remnick would have better things to do with their time.
I am just about to enter my newest artistic phase by getting one of those 8x10 cameras with the accordion mid-sections, which makes even the drollest, least well executed images an instant candidate for yet another tranche of great art that the unwashed masses will struggle, and struggle mightily to understand. At some point the most pretentious of them will give up and just pretend to understand the new work --- and some will even profess to like it. In spite of all I do to make my work intellectually inaccessible...
anyone who questions the value of empty, banal chaos on cheap paper will be set upon by the art cognoscenti, and their thugs, and be drummed out of the gallery circuit only to find tentative solace in their new friendships with the huddled masses of failed and desperate artists who are still struggling to monetize their Instagram accounts.
I won't care because I will have already sold out all the limited editions of "The Thick Opaque Visual Gravy of American Society -- a portfolio" and will have secured my place forever in the history of fine art photography. I will then turn to cinematic comedy and attempt to garner, from the French, a coveted, Jerry Lewis Medal of the Highest Arts from the curators at the Pompidou Centre. The tie-in being my use of my stand up comedy routine, translated into French, as captions for "The Thick Gravy....."
Oh Dear. Must run. Crucial to have drinks with a whole new generation of online magazine editors. Gotta keep the gallery ball rolling....
I'd leave you with words of encouragement like: "If I can do this so can you!" But the truth is that the actual work is secondary to your personal relationship with the gatekeepers. You'll probably never be invited into the inner sanctum. Thank goodness my day job consists of working for a large U.S. intelligence agency. I was able to use black mail and threats about national security to secure my place in the art pantheon. I might also suggest having access to a large and liquid trust fund. That seemed to work well for Stephen...
Plate #324. "The Ghost of Blueberry Pancakes and compound interest.
Plate #1023 "Receding Industrial Wall."
We have sixty five hundred versions of "Wall receding toward Abilene" but
I'm still not sure which one to use on the magazine cover....
Industrial Strength Birkenstock Sandals. A SW USA artist standard for year round art creation.
C'est la vie.
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